


upon my liar's chair

by Lessandra



Category: Battle Creek (TV)
Genre: 'cause I know it will be, (we'll see what happens later got my fingers crossed), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Lovers, I don't really write comedy well I don't think, I really appreciate that about him, M/M, Milt is kind of a sarcastic asshole behind his polite exterior isn’t he, Relationship Is Hard, a little bit more dramatic than the original, and once again, canon compliant up to episode 1.08, trash queen of small fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 11:27:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3894619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lessandra/pseuds/Lessandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re a bit like a bulldog, you know that?” Milt tells him in one of his less charitable moments. “You just go for the jugular, and clench your teeth around your prey’s throat, and you do not let go, not until you get to the bottom of things. You just dig, and you dig, and—”  And, well, Milt can’t have him digging just anywhere. He leaves Russ a trail of his own making to follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	upon my liar's chair

**Author's Note:**

> On one hand, I hesitate publishing this, because when it will be inevitably Jossed, I will probably wanna retcon my own fic and make it more compliant. On the other hand, I don’t want to **_not_** publish it and then regret it. So here goes nothing.
> 
>  **Edit:** Now with a [translation into Chinese](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3956464) by the lovely _Jacinta_Jane_! Thank you so much!

Sometimes being in Battle Creek feels like being stuffed into a pocket calculator after spending most of his life as a new-gen smartphone. There’s a lot about this position that Milt privately resents—not that he lets on.

“What were you, born in a house with seven horseshoes?” Russ grunts at him.

That’s not really an actual question, more of a throwaway insult, but Milt still raises his eyebrows inquiringly. “Excuse me?”

“Nobody’s that _lucky_ ,” Russ says accusingly, as they are leading away a perp that he has been chasing yet Milt has managed to arrest.

He doesn’t feel very lucky for being here. Hard to forget what came before.

“I don’t believe in luck,” he states demurely. “I believe that hard work pays off,” he looks at Russ candidly and pretends that he doesn’t see how a privileged upbringing might influence things—just to mess with him.

Russ gives him a look like he’s soft in the head. Milt doesn’t know why but it amuses him.

 

~***~

 

“I hate your place,” Russ points out, when Milt once again provides his safehouse for them to stash a witness in.

Milt’s still lodging in it— _‘temporarily’_ , of course. In a screwed-up fashion this feels a little like having guests.

“It’s not my place,” he insists, although by this point it’s debatable.

“Hence why I hate it—‘cause it’s a _warehouse!_ ” Russ looks around at the white walls, barren of any sign of personality. “It’s like a corpse lives here. It’s like _no one_ lives here. Do you sleep in one of your boxes too? Do you plug out your memory core and shut down?”

“It’s expedient,” Milt says. Might also have something to do with the fact that it feels fitting to deny himself small comforts. He’s never been above self-flagellation.

“Exactly how ready to scram from here are you?” Russ asks, scrutinizing him.

Milt turns his head to look at him sharply. “Most of my stuff is back in Detroit, in storage. I don’t have anything to unpack anyway.” He doesn’t wish to explain himself to Russ, but it still comes out sounding defensive and like an excuse. Probably more revealing than he means for it to be, too.

Russ seems to draw the same conclusion. “Well, at least you’re not actually planning to stick around,” he says. “Good to know.”

 

~***~

 

Watching the mayor and his brother, Milt almost tells Russ about what sent him to Battle Creek. About thankless missions, and loving people you shouldn’t, and white lies, and gravity. But he doesn’t really know how, and he wisely decides against trying.

He hasn’t had an actual friend since half a lifetime ago.

 

~***~

 

Milt knows with a high level of certainty that he is liked, and welcomed, and accepted at face value in Battle Creek. Maybe not by the Commander, he suspects, but she is polite enough and uncurious enough to appreciate his being here for the advantages it gives her, without looking for the strings he comes attached with.

Russ Agnew, though. The man doesn’t have the foresight of running a department. What he _does_ have is an enviable, single-minded tenacity. It takes Milt less than five minutes to know that he will need to keep a close eye on where that tenacity leads him.

“You’re a bit like a bulldog, you know that?” Milt tells him in one of his less charitable moments.

He tries to pet Cookie, but she demonstratively avoids the touch of his fingers and goes to sit by Russ’s leg. The two of them are pretending to be talking about the case at hand. As it often happens with them, they aren’t really.

“You just go for the jugular, and clench your teeth around your prey’s throat, and you do not let go, not until you get to the bottom of things. You just dig, and you dig, and—” And, well, Milt can’t have him digging just anywhere. He leaves Russ a trail of his own making to follow. “You don’t let go of things.”

(Which makes him a fantastic detective, and a real thorn in Milt’s side.)

“ _Prey_ , huh?” Russ gives him a scornfully amused look. “Hilarious, coming from you.”

“Why?” he returns guardedly. “Who do I remind you of?”

“A jackal,” Russ says goadingly, tugging Cookie’s ear, playfully rough. Milt watches his hands. Russ cut them on glass pursuing a suspect last week; he’s got nice hands. “Although I _am_ currently tempted to say _‘best bitch in breed’_.”

Milt rolls his eyes. Not so nice a tongue, though. “Why a jackal?” he asks. He lets the other one go.

“‘Cause it’s a trickster god in Native American folklore, and you’re a fucking liar.”

Milt is so nonplussed he forgets to be offended. He stares at Russ for long enough a moment that the man gets angrily flustered, starts rubbing his neck nervously.

“It’s—uh—Holly said that,” he mutters. “I might have—mentioned that you were like a Big Bad Wolf, and she said that if I’m really gunning for an appropriate comparison, I should go with the jackal. You know how she is with trivia.”

Milt does know: she is way too good for this town. “It’s a coyote. Actually,” he corrects out loud. “Coyote is the trickster in Native American folklore.”

“Huh,” Russ is unembarrassed of his mistake. “Well, jackal rhymes with jackass. So. There. Suck on that.” He gets up, and Cookie pants happily, glad to be moving on.

“That—it—doesn’t—” Milt can’t find a proper rejoinder in time and folds, mumbling to himself, “doesn’t even make sense.”

“Uh-huh, whatever,” Russ throws over his shoulder as he’s walking away.

 

~***~

 

“So, you’re like, what, Constable Fraser?” Russ seizes Milt up critically. He means it in an insulting way.

Milt is driving them to the crime scene. He tears his eyes away from the road to give Russ a profoundly flummoxed look. “Agent Fraser’s not a Constable.”

“Not the _dog_ , you moron. _Benton_ Fraser?”

Milt throws Russ one quick glance. “I don’t know who that is,” he admits flatly.

“It’s—You don’t?—ugh. Forget it. It’s a—a TV show, _Due—_ ” he shakes his head in irritation, and says loudly, “Point is! he ends up stationed where he is because _no one_ in his chain of command wants him anymore.” Russ looks at Milt with triumph, the point of his insult finally delivered. “Bet you were an insufferable prick too.”

“Huh.” Milt considers it. “He’s the principal character though, I’m guessing?” he asks eventually.

“Yeah?”

“So, he’s made _awesome_ by his character flaws?” Milt’s face doesn’t change, but there’s something about the slant of his eyebrow, that on the inside, Russ is sure, he’s smirking.

“Shut up,” Russ hunches, sinking deeper into his seat, and wishes that they’d already arrived so he could slam the door dramatically.

 

~***~

 

If Russ were to tell anyone, they wouldn’t have believed him, would have thought he was just being a jerk, but Milt is actually kind of an asshole. A very subtle kind of asshole who delivers his poignant remarks with such sincerity that Russ seems to be the only one who can detect his bullshit.

 _‘I don’t think you’re pathetic at all,’_ he mutters to himself with a scowl. And that brazen fucking smile, too. _Ass_.

“Why didn’t they just ship him off to fucking Antarctica?” Russ complains out loud, to no one in particular, and he’s only _half_ -joking. “Why saddle _us_ with him?”

“Yeah,” Jacocks drawls. “Mass spectrometers, NSA databases, digital crime boards. I feel so inconvenienced.” She gives him a dirty look, wishing that he’d give it a rest about Milt Chamberlain already.

“Technically, you can’t banish someone to Antarctica, I don’t think,” Font says. “They only take volunteers.” Russ glares at him in disbelief, and his friend shrugs uncomfortably, “Uh, trivia night.”

“Well, maybe someone should have volunteered him then!” Russ declares bitingly.

And of course, speak of the devil, Milt picks this precise moment to come in. “Hey, guys. Whatcha talking about?” His pearly smile is threatening to split his cheeks, and oh, but he knows _exactly_ what they were talking about—maybe because of Font’s abysmal poker face, or maybe he just expects people to talk about him all the time like the center of the fucking universe he thinks he is.

“Hey, Milt,” he throws back. “Would you consider going to Antarctica?”

Milt stares at him, conscious of a possible trap. “Why?” he says slowly. “What’s in Antarctica?”

“I dunno. Something, I’m sure? You go where you’re needed, right? I’m sure the penguins of McMurdo are in _dire_ need of your environmental activism.”

Milt relaxes a fraction. “Not to worry. They are already protected by Antarctic Treaty System. And by the IUCN. I don’t think the FBI has to get involved.”

He smiles his Golden Boy smile, and everyone else in the office looks at Russ admonishingly. He clenches his teeth and gives Milt a filthy stare.

It would have been nice if he at least delivered his sarcasm as, you know, _sarcastic_. Instead of widening his eyes innocently, and employing his most clueless and defenseless tone. Like he’s this confused patron saint of Battle Creek. Like for a second he _actually_ considered the fate of penguins and took it earnestly to heart. Like he’s actually, at his core, _decent_. Like Russ’s bitter remarks all go over his head. Russ _knows_ they don’t. And Milt knows that he knows.

Still ends up the one looking like the asshole.

 

~***~

 

“I got another one for you. You’re Dana Scully.”

 _“What?”_ Milt stares at him, bewildered and indignant at once, and it’s oddly, disproportionally gratifying to get a rise out of him, even on something as stupid and insignificant as this. _“Why?!”_

“She hates being assigned to the X-Files. It’s a punishment. For both her,” Russ point at Milt, “ _and_ Mulder,” he points at himself.

“Why am I not Mulder?” Milt demands, still more baffled than insulted. “Isn’t he the one being punished?”

“Because,” Russ shrugs, like it should be obvious. “I am the handsome one who sees the truth of things. And you’re the uptight corporal tool sent here to make my life miserable.”

 

~***~

 

Niblet and Funkhauser both add Milt’s e-mail to their in-office mass forwarding. Considerate of them, really. Milt perks up when a notification in his inbox pops up, then snorts up his coffee through his nose when he sees the pictures inside.

The bachelor party has been going great. Red is really Russ’s color.

Most of the photos are blurry, taken by drunken hands, but a few are wonderfully crisp. After winning a battle with his conscience, Milt saves them all on his internal hard drive—out of sight, but never really out of mind.

 

~***~

 

Sometimes, the cases just suck—that’s law enforcement.

Karen Reed dies because nobody in her life cared enough about what happens to her. They spend three days investigating suspicions of foul play, but in the end Meredith rules it a suicide. No one even cared enough to kill her. No one knew she was depressed enough and felt invisible enough to do it herself.

“Don’t you want to?—Yes, ma’am, I understand that, but—Yes. Yes.” Russ attempts to ask something of the girl’s aunt over the phone, then gives up and proceeds to grunt several times to whatever she is saying to him. Hanging up the phone, he slams it down several times, and it’s a miracle the handle doesn’t break.

Grimly, he says, “They aren’t claiming the body.”

The atmosphere in the office, already glum, darkens even further.

“I’ll pay for the funeral,” Milt offers after a tense moment. Russ looks at him angrily, but it’s not about him, or yanking his chain, for once. “Look, over the last three days we’ve come to know her better than anyone in her life anyway,” he says. “Might as well pay our final respects to her too.” He looks at Guziewicz questioningly. He would have still gone ahead with it if she said no, but he prefers to stay on good terms with the woman.

The funeral feels like closure.

After the fact, Russ thanks him, and doesn’t even choke on the words. Milt smiles at him—a small, stiff expression, not his usual routine cheerfulness—and suspects that maybe, on occasion, Russ doesn’t hate him.

 

~***~

 

Milt would call what he and Russ are _an_ _ironic symmetry_.

(Granted, the description pops into his head after one shot too many—when Russ tries to get him drunk in order to ask him why he’s in Battle Creek, while Milt tries to balance keeping up with him and staying sober in order to prevent something disastrous from happening. Russ’s hands refill their glasses fast and slap him on the back with unusual frequency. He still got nice hands.)

Russ is an unlikable pain in the neck. But Milt looks on at the life of the Battle Creek tiny police department from the outside, and sees the others groan and criticize and complain, but _love_ him. Russ still somehow ends up under a warped misconception that he’s not good enough on his own, and so he continues to throw covert glances at Holly and not say anything.

Milt gets along with people great. Milt is the guy you _want_ to be friends with. He is also the guy to keep you at arm’s length, because he knows as certain as the rising sun that he is not _liked_ by people. Come close enough and you’ll see, he’s got nothing in him to be liked _for._

He moves to Battle Creek, and no one in Detroit misses him. He gets one call: he has forgotten to cancel a dentist’s appointment.

That Russ openly resents him from day one is refreshing, and dismaying, and frustrating, and a challenge all at once. It’s _new_. Milt pulls his file and requests him as a partner and tries to pick his life apart, wondering how to make him stop asking questions Milt doesn’t want to give answers to. He keeps wondering where they’ll end up in the long run.

Russ doesn’t trust most of what Milt says, and doesn’t even trust the fact that Milt can like him without Russ needing to do anything aside from being a good cop and a good person.

They are quite a pair.

 

~***~

 

Considering Milt’s sporadic appearances on the front pages of the local newspaper, to have him go undercover is, in Russ’s opinion, inconceivably stupid. Milt is, as always, naively sure that the newcomers from Wyoming have no idea who he is and have very little interest in Battle Creek news. Besides, he is just too busy wasting FBI resources on setting up a foolproof cover that he won’t need for more than a few days. Sometimes Russ thinks that he’s like a boy who loved playing with toy castles and continues playing with life-sized ones.

“You rented a mansion?” he asks with a stony expression.

Milt seems pleased with this new high of his extravaganza. “Go big or go home, right?”

“Please tell me you aren’t planning on keeping it,” Russ nearly begs him with a pinched expression. “I don’t—just—You aren’t. Are you?”

Milt’s patina of cheerfulness disappears and he regards Russ steadily. “What would I need a mansion for, Russel?”

“You were born _literally_ with a silver spoon already sticking out of your palate. Why _wouldn’t_ you want to go back to silk sheets and marble toilets?”

For some reason that makes Milt snort. “I am with means,” he agrees, “but I am not insane. How much time I could spend in a house this big before I’m bored stupid? Why would I want something larger than two bedrooms?”

“And then why would you want two bedrooms when you can just live out of your boxes, right?”

The thing is, regardless of what he’s saying, Milt looks right at home here; like he knows how to _be_ at home in this senseless luxury. Looks like he hasn’t worked a day in his life—which, admittedly, Russ knows not to be true, Milt is an aggravatingly meticulous worker.

It only grates at Russ that much more: because it’s just too _easy_ for him, to change skins like that, to slip in and out, a natural chameleon. And maybe he _is_ the best candidate for undercover work after all. Makes Russ question how much of Milt Chamberlain is a carefully constructed lie.

 

~***~

 

On the good days, Goose allows him to keep Milt out of the investigations for as long as possible.

(The guy still finds a pretense to include himself eventually, but there’s a small window of time when Russ can just do what he does best, and it’s almost like Milt Chamberlain never came to Battle Creek. Still not _exactly_ the same, though: at any moment Russ is always expecting him to just show up and can never relax anymore.)

On the bad days, Goose insists on it instead.

Finding a body that belongs to a cousin of a Detroit mobster twice-removed, for example? A _bad day._

“Don’t say it,” he begs, pinching his nose.

She gives him a wryly amused look, and _says_ it. “I think we need to ask Milt for a favor.”

“A _favor?_ Are you _kidding_ me, you couldn’t have phrased it better? You wanna sign over your soul to the devil while you’re at it?”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Russ. The FBI keeps their finger on the pulse when it comes to the mob, and they will have answers. Luckily, their office is, oh, right over there, not thirty feet away from ours.”

“Nah-uh. No way.”

“Russ. I have no clue why agent Chamberlain likes you—maybe he’s a sucker for punishment—”

“Oh, har har,” Russ grimaces.

“—but he _does_ ,” she continues, unperturbed. “So it falls onto you. Go and do what your Commander tells you to do. Liaise.”

Walking out of her office, Russ can feel the resentment in his _bones_.

Through the glass, however, he spots that Milt’s chair is empty. Undoubtedly already off investigating the case anyway, not waiting for any invites, Russ figures with a jaundiced feeling, but still enters his office.

“He’s not here,” the girl at the desk says in a dull tone, not bothering to look up at him.

“Yeah, no kidding. Where is he?”

Hearing his voice, she looks up, deeming him worthy her attention after all. “Detective. He had to take a personal day.”

Russ regards the empty chair suspiciously, like any moment Milt might materialize there from a puff of smoke. He doesn’t strike Russ as a man who takes personal days unless he is dying from a brain tumor. Probably not even then.

“What’s your name?” he interrogates the girl.

She gives him a leery look. “Christine,” she says frostily.

“Christine,” he nods and leans against her table with an air of put-on familiarity, or at least he hopes that’s what it appears like. “So… you and Milt.” She gives him a sharp, warning stare, and he waves his hand, “Not like that. I mean, do you ever, like, talk? Do you know the guy?”

“I wasn’t even directly hired by him. I doubt he knows my name.”

“Oh, he knows,” he dismisses it. She gives him another sharp look, and Russ scoffs. “It’s a superpower of his. He always knows the pretty girl’s name. Whatever. So. You know nothing about why he’s in Battle Creek, I’m guessing?”

“You’re good at guessing,” she says.

“Maybe you could ask him?”

“Maybe I could not get fired?” she plasters on a smile of fake politeness, and he snorts: she’s not nearly as skilled at concealing her attitude behind pearly whites as Milt is. Then again, maybe she’s not trying to. “Will that be all? You need his home address? Contact information?”

“Nah. I’m good.” It was a long shot anyway.

He drives to Milt’s safehouse and bangs on the door, and for some reason doesn’t bother to call ahead and check if he’s even there. Possibly to use it as an added excuse to lash out at Milt, but he can already picture how that conversation will go:

_‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. What am I, your errand boy?’_

_‘Russ, I have a phone. It’s in my pocket, right here. You could have called.’_

Maybe he does hate tech a little bit.

The door slides open, and Milt stands before him, looking not at all domestic. Still in his sleek suit, still wearing a tie and even _cufflinks_. Like he was going to come in, but then changed his mind at the last minute.

“Do you sleep in that two-piece?” Russ makes a face at him. “Is the tie actually growing out of your Adam’s apple?”

Milt’s eyebrows crawl up to his hairline. “Hello, Russ,” he says.

“You don’t look sick.”

“I took a personal day, not a sick day,” Milt answers, still looking bewildered.

“Well, fun’s over. We caught a case, and Detroit mafia might be involved, and we need your FBI tricks to move things along.” He gives Milt another head-to-toe glance. “I’d say get dressed but—”

Milt wavers only for a second before nodding readily. “All right. Let me grab my things.” He goes back inside and promptly returns with his briefcase, smoothing over his blasted tie. “Let’s go.”

“Just like that? What kind of a personal day is that?”

Milt is standing close enough to be actively looking down at him. Makes him look aggravatingly patronizing when he says, “One that I’d rather spend keeping myself busy with work.”

He walks on ahead, and Russ stares at his back skeptically. “What does a man like _you_ can possibly sulk about?” He follows Milt out. “Oh. Wait. You’re not gonna tell me.”

“You know, you keep making that mistake about me,” Milt retorts, as if to contradict him.

“Hm? What’s that?”

“That you think I’m somehow lucky,” Milt continues looking straight ahead. “And I know why. I was born in Monaco, had a privileged childhood, got around, knew people. I have a nice job, and the tech, and the financing—”

“Is there a _‘but’_ coming, or are you just flashing your dick?” Russ interrupts, jaw locking tightly.

“The thing that you keep missing, Russ, is that it isn’t luck.”

“If you say something about hard work paying off again, I swear to God I’m gonna kick you in the nuts.”

Milt levels him with an exasperated stare. “It’s not luck when it doesn’t bring you happiness.”

Russ stares at him for a long moment, trying to decide how full of shit he is. It sounds like one of his fortune cookie platitudes. “Only a man who has never lived in the gunk of it would say something stupid like that,” he contends.

Milt scoffs and drops his head in defeat. “Yeah. Glad we had this talk.”

 

~***~

 

There’s an expression Russ gets when his eyes follow Holly—far away and unbothered, thinking of something he’s considered before, will consider again, knows the full extent of. The calm of his face crumples into a scowl when The Coffee Shop Guy shows up to meet Holly at the end of the day. The curl of his lips is vaguely murderous.

While Russ is watching Holly, Milt is watching him.

He sympathizes, if only because he thinks winning Holly over would soften something inside of Russ, maybe loosen the clench of his teeth on the question of Milt’s past and incidentally make his life here a little easier.

Lazily, chin resting against steepled fingers, he wonders if getting laid will do anything for Russ’s disposition in general, or his attitude towards Milt in particular. He suspects being civil is just never going to be on the menu with them. Russ brushes the back of his head in a reflexive motion, and Milt’s eyes catch on his hand, and for a brief moment he is thinking of what he could do to improve Russ’s disposition. He has to flicker his eyes away and blinks rapidly, dislodging the thought from his mind.

When he raises his head, their eyes meet in a mirror, and of course Russ hasn’t missed him staring, never misses anything. Milt looks away again.

“What?” Russ demands with annoyance and turns around to face him.

“Nothing,” Milt says, keeping his eyes fixed on the computer screen, and feels a little trapped, and feels a little guilty.

 

~***~

 

Russ jerks awake and slams his head against the window of the van. His whole body is screwed up in an aching lump. They’re on a stakeout, or they’re supposed to be, only he apparently fell asleep. In front of Mr. Perfect Performance no less.

“What the hell, man?” he glares at Milt who’s staring at him with his aggravating, _unwanted_ concern. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You seemed like you needed a little shut-eye,” Milt answers politely. “Nothing was happening anyway. I can keep an eye on nothing.”

“Yeah, well, what I don’t need is a creak in my neck from falling asleep in this fucking position.” He stretches. His spine cracks in three places, and his neck cracks in both directions. Milt winces.

Russ scratches his eyes. It feels weird. He just doesn’t let his guard down like this—not enough to fall asleep in front of a colleague, definitely not in front of Milt.

“You should go get us coffee,” Milt suggests. At least he’s not staring anymore.

“Yeah, like I’d leave you alone here. As soon as I’m gone, the culprit will finally crawl out of her hidey-hole, and you’ll chase her down and get all the glory, like you always do.” The vehemence in his tone is somewhat undermined by his unseemly yawn that he fails to stifle.

“Well, I would gladly get us coffee myself, but my worry is that as soon as _I_ am gone, you’ll fall _asleep_ again and miss her coming and going completely.” Milt sounds a little pissed off, which is rare and makes Russ smirk.

“Piss off. I don’t need coffee anyway. Your voice is plenty enough to wake me.”

Milt chuckles throatily, irritated: his lips don’t really move, and it’s just a low reverberation right in his chest. The sound makes Russ’s skin prickle.

Shaking his head, Milt fishes out his phone.

Russ gives it a sideways glance and snorts. “What are you gonna do? Play us a stakeout mix? Is it a special FBI beta wave generator that keeps the brain awake?”

“No. I’m calling _you,_ ” Milt replies testily and seems to swallow the _‘asshole’_ that clearly belongs at the end of that sentence. His patience is running thin.

Russ lets out a startled laugh. “What? Why?”

“So _I_ can go get coffee, and you can stay awake and keep me updated if someone _does_ show up.”

“You are preposterous,” Russ chuckles, even though it’s actually kind of reasonable. “You and tech, honestly. Do your girlfriends get jealous over this special love affair of yours?” His phone buzzes and he flips it open and speaks into it, “Do you talk to Siri?”

Milt glares at him, holding the phone up to his ear, and gets out of the car. His voice, distorted in Russ’s phone, asks, “How do you take your coffee?”

“Black. Like your soul.”

Milt sighs. “And will it contain as much sugar as your sense of humor—which is to say, none?”

“If I wanted coffee that tastes nice, I’d get it at your office. This swill is to wake us up.” Away from Milt’s watchful eyes Russ allows himself to stretch again, lazier and unconstrained.

“How’s your periodic table?”

Russ pauses. “Is that a serious question?”

“I won’t be able to talk while I’m paying, so. I need you to name the elements to me.”

“‘Cause that’s somehow supposed to _not_ put me to sleep?”

Milt _hm’_ s and concedes. “How about singing the national anthem?”

“How about _shut up!_ ”

“Just… do something with your mouth.” Russ squints, bemused, and there’s a brief moment of silence when both of them seem to realize this sounded a bit off. “Uh. Talking. I mean—yeah.”

He disappears from the phone before Russ figures out a clever comeback. He can hear Milt’s muffled voice as he orders two black coffees. And if the sentence was in any shape or form insinuating, neither of them remarks on it when he returns.

 

~***~

 

“I apologize if the situation makes you uncomfortable.”

“Bringing my felon mom to work? Oh no, perish the thought. Not uncomfortable at all.” Russ scowls for a few moments, before adding spitefully, “I know you did it to mess with me, but I’m telling you it will bite you in the ass.”

Milt looks innocent and insulted. “I did it because she can help the case,” he says slowly.

“Oh sure. She’ll help _her_ case. And then she’ll help herself to a case full of stashed _money_ , and an escape, and to your dignity, and mine. The woman’s a much better liar than you.”

“Huh,” Milt says. It makes Russ stiffen in long-suffering anticipation of what else Milt is about to pull out of his ass.

“What?” he demands. “Let’s have it.”

“Nothing. I just said, ‘huh.’”

“Yeah, and when it doesn’t mean _‘that’s strange’_ , it usually means _‘can’t believe you’re such a dick, Russ’_. Or it could also mean, _‘eureka’_ and—” Milt’s giving him a look that he wears sometimes, a dark and intent one, that Russ can’t figure out. It probably means he should stop embarrassing himself with what he’s saying. “Uh—I don’t—I don’t have a classification of your ‘huh’s, or anything, I was spit-balling. But it was accurate.”

“Huh,” Milt says. Which Russ translates as, _‘Bullshit.’_ Milt seems pleased with whatever, for some reason, and Russ can only scowl.

 

~***~

 

They sit in Milt’s office after hours. The entire building of the murder victim stonewalled them the whole day, and they’re beat, and Milt knew it would have been a waste of time, and Russ knew it too, but they were running out of options. The rest of the team went home some time ago, and the office of BCPD is submerged into darkness. Milt doesn’t hurry anywhere, because for him there’s really little difference between being at the office or at the safehouse. He really should pick up a hobby.

He isn’t sure why Russ is still here, but he appreciates the company.

“Someday,” Russ says in a sedated voice, “you’re gonna tell me why you’re in Battle Creek.”

“Someday, when it won’t matter anymore, I will,” Milt agrees.

Tonight, Russ doesn’t argue with that response.

 

~***~

 

“You know, I didn’t think it was possible, but I suspect my apartment costs more than your—whatever you call it, hideout from life—because it actually has _things_ in it.” Russ hunches forward on Milt’s couch with an unpleasant grimace, rubbing his face. He hates being here.

Russ’s place has Russ, which Milt suspects is what truly makes all the difference: Russ fills the spaces of Milt’s safehouse instantly, and makes it feel less like a stripped skeleton.

Almost worth the throbbing pain in his shoulder. Somebody—quite possibly the Detroit mob, because those guys are _everywhere_ and also _assholes!_ —almost blew them up. They were lucky enough to get away with just a few scratches. Milt is sporting a nasty burn on his shoulder; hurts worse than it is.

The nurse patching him up is pretty. She smiles at him fleetingly—a service smile, one that Milt knows too well—and is really only concerned with applying bandages. He keeps his eyes trained on her lovely frown under the guise of being charmed. Beats meeting Russ’s stare. Milt can feel his eyes boring into him, and feels exposed, and can feel his angry accusations without looking. His lungs seem to stretch out painfully with every breath.

“All done,” the girl tells him, and his smile to her is a little more sincere. He hurries to throw a fresh shirt on. The stiff ironed-out smoothness of it feels cool against his heated skin. He sees her and the rest of the Bureau’s team out: the safehouse has been secured and triple-checked, and it wasn’t even a chore to let them poke around his living space because he’s got nothing much of his own here. Milt shuts the door behind them, and him and Russ are left alone with a long wait.

He’s still overflowing with adrenaline, skin tingling in anticipation of something, and he can’t quite compose himself. Turning around, he crosses his arms on his chest defensively and observes Russ on his couch. He can almost hear the gritting of his teeth.

“I hate this. Sitting on my hands,” Russ says, staring at the floorboards grimly.

“I know.” And he does. He is _itching_ for something to do.

Russ looks up a little, neck still bent crookedly. “I’d try small talk, but—” he leaves the phrase hanging. “I mean this _is_ usually the point where somebody asks something innocuous about the other one’s past. Would have been nice if you had a past you weren’t hiding, hm?”

Instead of being baited, Milt goes over to the fridge and retrieves two bottles of beer. He sets one of them on a coaster in front of Russ and pins him with a stare. Russ conveys his _‘Thought so,’_ through a loud snort but relaxes back into the couch without arguments.

“So. Let me guess. We’re in no danger regardless, ‘cause naturally you can defuse a bomb, too? Or have an app that does it?”

“No,” Milt makes a face at him because that’s just nonsense. “I’m not a military specialist.”

“Oh? Alert the media. Milt Chamberlain admits there’s something he doesn’t know how to do.” Russ snorts again while Milt raises his eyebrows, and it is _very_ late, and they are _very_ stressed and very tired.

“I once saw a car bomb explode with the driver still in there. It’s very lucky that ours went off early,” Milt mumbles.

“I thought you didn’t believe in luck.”

He swirls the beer in his bottle. “Yeah, you got me there. Happy coincidence?”

“ _I_ don’t believe in coincidence,” Russ sneers.

“Providence, then! I mean, really, this is what we’re gonna squabble about now? Thesaurus?” Milt scoffs and reaches forward to grab the remote and switch the TV on but doesn’t look to see what’s on.

Leaning back, he continues studying Russ with intense focus, occasionally taking swigs at his bottle, but more as an afterthought, not actually tasting anything. The air of anticipation doesn’t leave him and weighs heavily on his chest, and restlessness still seems to slosh just underneath his skin.

In his head he turns over all the stupid decisions he’s made in his life. Most of them has led to him being here, in Battle Creek—and to being here, in this moment, tonight, although that doesn’t actually correlate, nor does it excuse making any further stupid decisions. He glances inside the bottle accusingly.

When he looks up, Russ is glaring back at him. “What are your staring at?”

Milt hesitates only for a fraction of a second. “Your face,” he says simply, maybe a little glibly, but it feels like there are coals inside his gut. He takes a nervous sip in the futile attempt to douse them.

Russ snorts. “Well, are you done?”

Milt snorts back at him and sets his beer on the table with determination, slamming it into the coaster. He rises to his feet and Russ stares at him warily, wondering what he’s up to now.

“Hardly,” he says, his voice a little pinched, and he comes up to Russ and slides onto his knees in front of him, and his hands come to rest on Russ’s thighs.

Russ jerks, tries to collect all his limbs uncomfortably and get out of Milt’s personal space. The bottle almost slips out of his floundering hand and Milt gently relieves him of it and sets it onto the coffee table and goes back to staring at Russ intently.

“What the hell are you doing?” Russ growls at him warningly, catching the movement of his hands.

“I thought it was pretty obvious.” (And it costs him considerable mental strength to sound this smooth.)

Russ looks at him and laughs. “ _Me?_ ” he sneers in sheer, honest disbelief. “Is that one of your little games, huh, Milt? You want _me?_ You want me to _believe_ you want me?”

Milt shrugs eloquently, saying _Yeah? So?_ without actually speaking—too much tension rising in his throat.

“Are you that desperate,” Russ states, not even asks, the question mark disappearing into the angry tightness of his voice.

Milt stares at him pointedly, and disallows himself to roll his eyes, because it’s thin ice they’re treading on here. “You’d hardly be my first choice if I were just _desperate,_ ” he says flatly. His heart is pounding painfully against his ribs.

Russ’s expression closes off, and Milt backtracks and thinks that he sounded a bit like an asshole there, and he adds quickly, “I’m pretty sure that on any given day there are at minimum six occasions where you want to punch me in the face. And I frequently want to reciprocate. This isn’t desperate.”

“Thought I wasn’t your type,” Russ says. Says it with a straight face, like it’s just a conversation they’re having. Like Milt is not on his knees in front of him, like Russ doesn’t have Milt’s hands pinned down on both sides of himself.

He’s _stalling._

Milt watches the movement of his throat. Russ hasn’t torn his arms off yet, and hasn’t broken any of Milt’s fingers either. He takes it for a good sign.

“Why? Because you’re a man?” Milt asks.

“Because I’m single,” Russ needles, arching an eyebrow.

Ah, that story again. He’s almost certain Russ knows it was a lie.

“Well, look at it this way,” Milt gives him a wry look. “She was the wife of my partner, and I knew exactly what kind of trouble I was getting myself into by allowing this, whether it was fiction or the truth. And I still went with it. Maybe I just like them problematic. Maybe I like _you_ problematic.”

The answer makes Russ nervous. Because it sounds exactly like any other banter they might have shared, flippant and poignant and on the odd side of _fun_. And Milt can see Russ considering worriedly how much of it had to be Milt flirting. Honestly, he can’t be sure himself.

Russ finally pushes Milt’s hands away, sitting up rigidly. “No,” he rasps. His expression is less certain.

“Really?” Milt returns his hands onto Russ’s knees. “Or are you just saying that because you think I wasn’t told no enough times in my life, and you want to rub my face in it?”

Russ’s eyes flicker. “Possibly.”

“Well then, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to insist.”

And then, just like that, he slides his palms forward and unzips Russ’s pants and frees his cock, and _yes,_ oh yes he _wanted_ it, he definitely wanted it, and Milt puts his mouth around his cock, tongue pressing, pushing, working, and “Fuck,” Russ moans weakly, his fingers digging deep into the couch because he is too stiff to put them anywhere near Milt’s hair—which he wouldn’t have minded—and _fuck,_ it feels so good to be doing it, smells so good, _tastes so good_.

Russ gasps hoarsely, breathlessly, and god, how long has it been for him, Milt wonders, closing his eyes, and his tongue slides slickly on the underside of his cock as he sucks _._ Russ bucks his hips forward, and grips the leather harder, like he’s trying not to let himself just fuck his face, and _yes,_ Milt thinks, _yes, do it, I want you to,_ he relaxes his throat, and lets Russ slide further, deeper in, lets him ram into his mouth, and Russ moans, hot and low, and arches forward, and Milt sucks him down like there is no tomorrow.

Russ’s breathing grows faster, his thrusts more desperate, and then Milt feels his come spilling over his tongue, sharp, bitter, and Milt’s hands are still resting around Russ’s hips, and he feels every quake, every tremble of his orgasm, and _nothing_ ever feels as good as that.

He sits back on his haunches and wipes his mouth, and looks up at Russ’s face. He keeps his eyes closed, and Milt tucks him back in and rezips his pants, and only then does Russ dare look down. He looks dazed, and trapped, and sated, and guilty, and still so very desperate, and he has no idea what to do. Milt doesn’t either. He feels his own cock throb painfully in his pants and thinks that he at least won’t make Russ suffer through this awkward pause much longer. He rises to his feet.

Russ is staring at him, dark-eyed, and panting.

“Milt?” he says, and it stops him. “Are you gonna tell me why you’re in Battle Creek?”

Milt laughs, loudly, abashed and surprised, not expecting this at all, this is too absurd. “Really? I give you head, and now I _still_ get to answer inquiries about my past?”

“I’ll give you head,” Russ says readily, and what startles Milt is that he’s absolutely fucking serious. “Will you tell me then?”

“Are you always such a smooth-talker post-coitus?”

“Well, why did you do it then?” Russ looks at him in desperate, frustrated, _angry_ confusion, and Milt has so many answers to that, ranging from flippant to downright raw, because this wasn’t some quid pro quo as Russ seems to be imagining, but he has no words that would explain it all, or even half of it.

“I’m gonna go clean up,” is all he can say.

Russ watches him go until the bathroom door slams shut. His life, he feels, has stopped making sense, _any_ kind of sense. He feels dangerously close to a conniption fit, or a full-blown panic attack, and doing something rash, like maybe leaving the safehouse and oh, _moving to another city_ , and he looks around for any source of stability with desperation.

(He is rubbing his thigh with a tense hand, and does not, does _not_ think how fucking good it felt.)

Milt’s living arrangements are ridiculously, perfectly, insufferably pristine, like there’s a body snatching alien living here because no human being would be this immaculate. But to Russ’s left is a book shelf where—for once not ascribing to Milt’s perfect sense of order, unless of course that’s the whole point—stand, _‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’_ (in German), a tattered cook-book (in French), _‘Crime and Punishment’_ (hilariously ironic and, thankfully, not in Russian), a collection of Thomas Ligotti and a collection of Philip K. Dick, all topped off by a guide on _‘How to Weld’_ , which is juts **_random_** , but if that is what it’s like inside Milt’s head, than maybe there’s no wonder at all about anything that has happened tonight, maybe he is just **_crazy_**.

Russ hesitates between thinking that he should retreat into one of the bedrooms while he has the chance and then confront Milt tomorrow, and thinking that they will _never ever speak of this again_.

The next day, Milt gets himself shot.

 

~***~

 

Russ knocks on the door of Milt’s hospital room, and watches the man’s eyes flutter open. He manages to turn his head only barely, but smiles at the sight of Russ. “Hey,” he murmurs.

The smile immediately has Russ at a loss, opens up a hot oven in his gut.

“Mhmm. Flowers,” Milt drawls groggily. “How thoughtful.”

Russ stares at the bouquet in his hands stupidly. “Uh. Yeah.” Seemed only right since Milt got him one when Russ got shot way back when. He unceremoniously shoves the flowers into the nurse’s hands and waits for her to deposit them in water and then leave.

“Didya catch them?” Milt asks. His speech seems to slur a little bit.

“Yeah. Yeah, we did. You’re safe.” Russ rubs his mouth thoughtfully, maybe a little aggravated. It’s funny how a man like Milt: with pristine suits and empty living spaces, who stacks his towels and tucks his bed sheets like they do in hotel rooms, whose desk is free of clutter to the point of OCD, and who arranges the icons on his desktop and his phone in neat rows by _color_ —how a man like _that_ can at the same time be so _stupidly_ , outrageously _reckless_. It would be ironic, except he got shot, and so it’s really, really _not_.

Milt mimics firing a gun, and Russ hides a brief smile behind his palm, too. “You’re—uh—they got pumped full of painkillers something special, huh?”

Milt looks at him slyly. “Why? You wanna ask why I’m in Battle Creek again?” He laughs to himself. It’s a new kind of laugh that Russ hasn’t heard before, neither his honest rumble, nor his party line laughter, but something both inebriated and self-deprecating. “It’s morphine, not truth serum, y’know.”

“Yeah, no, I wanna ask about—um—you know—ask about—why—” He waves his hand on the verge of giving up and collapsing.

“Why I gave you the most amazing blowjob of your life?” Milt asks loudly.

“Keep you voice down!” Russ growls, looking around in nervous agitation.

Milt snorts and laughs again.

“But—Yie—Yeah,” Russ admits quietly.

Despite his loopiness, Milt appears to give the question an honest thought. “‘Cause I wanted to,” he admits with an air of chagrin. “At the time it all seemed like an excellent idea.”

Russ squints at him with sardonic disbelief. “See, I _know_ you’re playing me. I just can’t figure out what’s your angle,” he accuses him flatly.

 _“Playing you?”_ Milt echoes cluelessly.

“Yeah, playing me, _dickhead!_ You’re _always_ playing me!” Russ waves his hand dismissively.

“Yeah, I do,” Milt concedes, and wow but morphine seems to boost his honesty after all.

Russ stops like a hound on a blood trail. “Wait, really? You’re admitting it, that you’ve been playing me? Just like that?”

“You’re not that easy to play,” Milt shrugs and throws him a sheepish apologetic smile, like that should be somehow considered an acceptable excuse.

“My mother is a con woman, I am _impervious_ to being played,” Russ retorts, almost reflexively. Milt’s easy admittance has caught him a little off balance.

“Well, then. Maybe _you’re_ the one who’s playing me,” Milt suggests.

“Excuse me?” Not off balance enough to not take offense at this.

Milt nods. “Yeah. Maybe you’re trying to get me in the sack, so that I’d trust you, and then I will reveal all my secrets to you.”

Russ blinks, and resolutely refuses to think on that.

“Would that work?” he still asks, like a chump.

Milt barks a laugh. “Yeah,” he mutters, but Russ can’t tell if it’s a _‘keep dreaming’_ kind of a yeah, or if it’s an _‘it absolutely would’_. He sets his jaw angrily, and puts the thought out of his mind.

 

~***~

 

“Did you two have a fight?” Holly asks. She’s sweet like that.

“Something like,” Milt nods. If they did, it would have played out pretty much the same, he imagines. Possibly with more attempts from Russ to clock him in the jaw. Milt does not expect that to come up since it hasn’t already—Russ has an exceptionally short fuse and doesn’t nurse his outrage; it explodes, and than it’s over.

They don’t talk, not that they did much before other than about cases, and they definitely do not talk about what happened, although Milt knows Russ is thinking about it. Knows it because sporadically he thinks about it too—when his concentration slips and he forgets to stop himself—and because Russ’s sideways glances and anxious rubbing of his jaw aren’t exactly subtle.

When the next case strikes, Russ doesn’t come to pick him up, nor does Milt expect that to change suddenly. What does change is that for once he doesn’t burrow his way into the case uninvited and waits for Guziewicz to officially request his resources if the need arises.

His arrival when she does ask clearly makes Russ antsy. Milt stares at the crime scene and wonders if Russ is thinking about that unnameable thing, wonders when it will stop springing to both of their minds first thing, and if he wishes for it to stop or if he doesn’t.

“What happened?” Holly wonders—not out of idle curiosity but because she wishes to fix things for them. “I asked Russ and he flipped out. I think if it were someone else he would have yelled, but he has never raised his voice with me. He _respects_ me enough to have held it together. But he was mad.” She looks concerned, and also a little flattered, and there’s a tiny smile on her lips when she says the word ‘respects’.

Milt smiles back weakly, feeling a little ill, and his whole face hurts around that fake smile, and he wants to punch himself with a brick because she doesn’t deserve this, him mucking up her life with his poor decisions and poorer self-control. But that’s what he does, isn’t it? Wouldn’t be in this position otherwise.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she thinks he’s sympathizing with her about Russ’s anger issues, but he is apologizing for something else entirely.

 

~***~

 

 

Standing on Milt’s doorstep, Russ tries not to debate the reason why he’s here: justice or instinct. A case brings him over, because what else would it be, and it is entirely unimportant if what drives him is the desire to see that smug-mouthed shrew brought down, or an impulse he’s got no business examining closely.

It’s a murder case. The widow is inconsolable. Russ takes one look at her and _knows_ she’s involved. But as it often happens no one else seems to see the obvious. Can’t convict someone on a hunch—even if Russ’s hunches have never let him down. What has let him down, time and again, is the lack of social graces. He goes to see her, alone, and before he knows it she is lawyering up, and crying harassment, and actually crying, and he is causing her undue distress. So here he is, in front of Milt’s safehouse, suspended without pay, and not at all questioning if he’s here because he wants to put the venomous snake behind bars, or if it’s that he’s been looking for an excuse to be here.

Milt opens the door and seems surprised to see him. Russ studies his expression and can’t discern anything beyond that.

“I need your help,” he blurts out, and waits—for that tiny give, for the inevitable betrayal where Milt looks smug, or self-satisfied, or triumphant, or something else untrustworthy like that. Milt frowns, seizing him up, and looks nothing of the sort. He nods solemnly and motions for Russ to come in.

“I thought Guziewicz suspended you,” he says.

He sits down on the couch and motions for Russ to take a seat as well. Russ stares at him and can only shake his head because Milt’s sitting almost exactly where Russ has been when Milt decided it was a brilliant idea to blow him, and he cannot make himself sit anywhere near that spot, can’t allow himself to be distracted by anything from that insane night. He starts pacing. Milt watches him with the same careful expression.

“I think she’s hiding something,” Russ says eventually, rubbing his jaw.

Milt looks momentarily confused. “Guziewicz?”

“What! No! The wife! I think she’s—ugh—I think—I think—” he continues pacing, trying to recall everything that set off a warning bell in his head, and then he finds it, deep in his gut, with absolute certainty. He stops and stares at Milt. “She killed her husband.”

Milt’s face falls in stiff surprise. Whatever he was expecting, that wasn’t it. Russ blinks and flickers his eyes away, and he can feel his skin radiating his wonder at what Milt might have expected this visit to be about.

“Russ,” Milt’s voice saves him from the sucking vortex of doubt. “There is no evidence at all to support this.”

“I _know!_ It’s driving me insane! Worse than you!”

Milt balks, and Russ winces, because just this once he doesn’t mean to be an asshole, he wants this to go well, and not necessarily strictly for the case, too, but because he needs for this to lead _somewhere_ , to a place where he has steadier footing and can finally spit and yell at Milt and accuse him of mind games and get to the bottom of things.

“Guziewicz appointed you mandated visits to a shrink, didn’t she?” Milt changes the subject abruptly.

“Yeah?” Russ stops pacing again and thrusts his chin up angrily. “What does that have got to do with anything?”

Milt gives him a reproachful look, the one that manages to convey, _‘Please, don’t feign ignorance with me, Russ,’_ and damn him if he can’t just _hear_ Milt’s voice saying the actual words.

“Fine!” He throws his hands up. “But—she insisted on it! The widow! And what—you honestly think she’s the _victim?_ That I’m, what, that the work is getting to me? I’m not some raving lunatic, Milt, I don’t need no fucking anger management, she just wants you to dismiss me and stop digging, while she has time to fabricate another lie! And we need to find what she is hiding, and catch her, and—” He waves his hand and stares at Milt’s impenetrable patient expression. “Don’t tell me you’re _naïve_ enough to believe _her_ because she was _genuine_ or some bullshit like that, because I swear to God that _will_ make me go crazy and then I can’t guarantee I won’t try to bash your head in through the nearest wall.”

“On the contrary,” Milt says calmly. “You are the most self-possessed person I know. Granted, you might actually benefit from anger management, but—” he shrugs carelessly, and there’s a hint of a wry smile in the twitching of his mouth, “—it has never bothered me.”

Russ exhales. (It shouldn’t please him to hear Milt say it, it’s not like it was meant as any kind of a coy compliment. And if he’s smiling crookedly, it’s because the guy is saying something _sensible_ for once in his fucking life.) “So?” he asks impatiently.

“I hate speculating,” Milt says, standing up.

Russ meets his eyes, and that can’t be disappointment that he’s feeling, because you have to care to feel disappointed, you have to expect something, and he hasn’t been expecting anything from anyone since he was 13, because with a mother like his you simply can’t let yourself.

“Let’s get us some real evidence,” Milt says then, and Russ clenches his jaw, and Milt smiles at him and adds, “Tell me what you need me to do,” and that damned honesty in his voice again, and it makes something else clench in Russ’s chest too.

 

~***~

 

(“Jesus Christ!” he curses, and he’s completely winded, and it pains him to breathe. He is staring at the perp they have caught up with after a few blocks of chasing. Milt is cuffing him. “I am almost tempted to get the phone of your shoe guy. No one can run in these and have all his toes afterwards.”

Milt smirks, and oh, he is _good_ at smirking, Russ notes with distaste bordering on something else, something unsettling.

They are flushed from running, Milt less so, because he has _‘an excellent cobbler’_ , but hair is still drooping down his forehead, and he pushes it back and smoothes it, and Russ can only follow the movement of his hand with a parched tongue, and of course even this fucking gesture is full of elegance, and his fucking hand. His graceful, long-fingered hand with trimmed nails (hand that touched him, so fucking sure), Russ watches him drop it back to his thigh, and watches it for a moment longer, and when he looks up, he is trapped by Milt staring at him, he is caught, and it must have looked like he was checking out his ass, or something, because Milt licks his lips and looks fiery, neither pleased, nor displeased, and not smug, just intense.

Jacocks calls them away, and Milt breaks their staring contest, and Russ feels relieved, and suddenly can breathe again, but knows it’s only temporary.)

 

~***~

 

Russ has been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It doesn’t, and the anticipation clogs him up and makes his skin itch. They are pouring over the wife’s finances, and personal files, and other stuff Milt can just produce out of thin air, and it’s like he’s made a deal with the devil and done it blindly, doesn’t know what the price will be. Instead of busying himself with the documents, Russ finds himself studying Milt’s absorbed expression.

“Why are you helping me?” he asks, in the same challenging fault-finding tone that he asks, _‘Why are you in Battle Creek?’_

Milt looks up, startled, and searches his face. “I trust your gut,” he says finally.

Russ rolls his eyes. “Not this again?” Apparently, any and all questions posed to Milt are impossible to get a straight answer to.

Milt folds the file he’s holding in his hands and says, “Last time, I was just playing.”

“Playing what? Playing _me?_ ” Russ sneers.

Milt shrugs vaguely, like the answer is thereabouts and not really a straight one. “It was just a thing to say,” he replies. “A _me_ thing to say. I didn’t mean it.”

Russ leans back, and basks in the novelty of this honesty, not wondering if it comes with a price, and if the price has been that thing they refuse to remember, or if they are just finally moving into some bizarre friendship territory. This doesn’t feel exactly like friendship, but then again, nothing feels _exactly_ right with Milt, and everything is utterly unfamiliar.

“Let me ask you then, honestly. Why did you request me as a partner?”

Milt dithers for a bit, before sighing and caving, “Remember how I said that I admire the way you see things no one else sees?”

Russ frowns. “Mmhm, vaguely?”

Milt acknowledges it with a chuckle. “Understandable. You were nursing a hangover.”

Russ snorts. “Well, _now_ I remember.”

Milt keeps his eyes on him, steady and solid. “That’s why I’m helping you. And that’s why I wanted you as my partner. You see the criminal, and you just know.”

“Same way I looked at you and just knew, you mean?” Russ wonders sarcastically.

Milt’s expression is rebuking. “I’m not a criminal, Russ. But, you certainly knew _something_. I wanted to see where it will lead you.”

“And throw me off the right scent, correct?” Surprisingly, the admission doesn’t make him mad. Just the truth they both knew, finally out in the open.

“You’re not easy to dissuade,” Milt smiles.

Russ hides his mouth inside a fist, and maybe hides a smirk too, and _god_ but this conversation is insane, talking about how much bullshit Milt has spun his way, and Russ still doesn’t know half of that bullshit, and he still came in front of this man, it’s a vulnerability he can never not think about, and how is this his life?

“Is that what that crap about trust was? You thought I’d trust you and stop bugging you?” he asks.

Milt studies his hands. “That was one of my hopes,” he says reluctantly.

Russ narrows his eyes. “What was the other?”

Milt looks chagrined. “Get you together with Holly,” he murmurs after a while, so quietly Russ almost misses it. But he doesn’t and he laughs. Milt looks up, worried, clearly expecting him to be angry, but this is just too ironic.

“You thought what, I’d be grateful?” he sniggers.

“Or, you know. Preoccupied with romance,” Milt mumbles.

Russ laughs again. “Instead you seduced me away from her. Wow, that is some first-grade self-restraint, congratulations. Job well done.”

Milt doesn’t share his levity and attempts to hide his embarrassed face in one of the folders. Russ continues cackling, watching Milt’s ears turn red, and he thinks he gets it now, how it can just suddenly possess someone to stand up and do something crazy.

He feels in control again, and the only thing he can think of doing to wrestle more of it back is snatching the file out of Milt’s hands and pressing him down into the couch, half-straddling half-crushing him, and his eyes are startled and wide and ridiculously beautiful, and okay, Russ can say it, it’s just a fact, he knows he’s not much to look at, he is wiry and he isn’t getting any younger, and Milt is gorgeous from any objective point of view, and inside a few seconds Russ has his cock in his hand, gorgeous like the rest of him, and he tries not to think that it’s his hand, and tries not to think what the hell they’re both doing, and tries not to think how actually terrifying this all is to him, he works Milt’s cock not like he would his own, but like a negotiation, and what he keeps thinking is, _I got you now, asshole. I finally got you._

Only then Milt gasps into his ear; lets out a name, _his_ name, a breathless gasp and a hiss, _“Russsssss.”_ It almost makes him stutter in his pace, and he stares into Milt’s face, watches his eyelids flutter, he seems so unhinged and relaxed. And here is a man whose every word is absolutely conscious and carefully examined, who never lets go, and Russ can’t accept that this wasn’t just as conscious, it had to be conscious, except no, he is completely unaware.

Conscious would be moaning, loud and terribly fake, and conscious would be a litany of dirty talk that would have meant Milt is still in control of himself enough to egg Russ on like that, and he’s just… _not_. He’s coming apart, unafraid, in Russ’s hands, but every now and then he groans softly when he can’t hold it within, he gasps, and sometimes there’s a word, there’s an _‘Oh’_ , only a little louder than an exhale, and there’s a _‘Yesss,’_ a catch of breath. _“I need—”_ he says, and then there’s a muffled prolonged _‘Mmmhmm,’_ and Milt doesn’t say what it is he needs, what it is he wants, and Russ’s insides are clenching with the need to hear what it was that slipped through the cracks unsaid.

And then there’s his name. _(Russsssss.)_ Going straight to his cock, filling him with heat, and his own breath quickens impossibly.

Milt comes over his hand in a wet rush, and Russ is dazed by it, by him, and he is so, so not in control of anything anymore, least of all himself, and he wipes his hands with a cloth, while Milt catches his breath, and Russ is staring at him, in confusion and disbelief and anger, oh boy so much anger because where does he get off manipulating Russ like that without even trying, and he doesn’t mean to do it, has never meant to, this was only stress and getting off, that’s what it was, except than Milt said his name like that, like—like—and fucking hell, he doesn’t even have a word for it, he grabs Milt’s jaw, and Milt’s eyes open wide, and he hasn’t been expecting it either, and maybe this is the moment where Russ finally has him, and maybe this is the moment when it finally just _doesn’t matter_ , he kisses him.

His hand slides over Milt’s cleanly shaven jaw to the back of his head, and Milt waits and doesn’t hurry him into anything, waits for it to happen, and Russ manages to get to his mouth without any reciprocation, without any play at making it tempting on Milt’s part, he just makes a _choice_ , _his own_ choice, all on his own.

Milt relaxes back and angles his face, and he allows Russ to kiss him at his own pace, doesn’t push for anything, and Russ is making all of it happen, and there it is, the _control_ he has been gunning for, and it is pure terror. Milt’s hand creeps up to rest on Russ’s waist, and Milt’s tongue pushes at his own, and it is hotter than anything he has ever done, because there has never been this equality. A woman is always sensual in a way that begets reverence, and no matter how assertive she is, you still worship her a little, and you still conquer her a little, and it’s not that this is making Russ feel like a girl, but he just never felt the push and pull of being seduced by a kiss like this, of having it laid out on him, and he is conquering, but he is being conquered too.

Somewhere along the line he stops thinking about it, and stops caring if he’s controlling it or if he isn’t, because letting Milt steer this to whatever comes next, blindly, unsuspectingly, is a rush, is a thrill, and a gasp that happens when they break for air might have belonged to him, too.

He rests his temple against the side of Milt’s forehead, and shudders when Milt lifts his face and nuzzles into his stubble, just for a moment, and he has no idea what is happening anymore, with his life, and with his body, and with this impossible outrageous man he’s got pinned down but couldn’t be further away from figuring out.

Milt is waiting for him to come around and guesses his meltdown with his usual astuteness, and gently says, “The case, Russ?”

“Yes. Mmhm.” He staggers back and envies Milt’s ability to sit up, face completely red and mouth completely ravaged, and pretend that this has not been the hottest orgasm of forever, but he is grateful for the chance to hide behind the work, too. It’s the only thing he can be certain of any more.

He thinks, stupidly, that maybe Milt shouldn’t be so trusting of Russ’s gut. As of late, it hasn’t led him anywhere good.

 

~***~

 

They nail the bitch, because of course they do, and for the first time Russ allows Milt into his own apartment. It seemed sacrosanct before, because who knows what his keen eyes will see, and his keener tongue will remark upon, but the prospect doesn’t trouble him any longer. They drink beer, and talk, and Russ not once asks about Milt’s reasons for being in Battle Creek, even after Milt divulges openly him that no one from his past talks to him anymore.

Nothing happens that night, even though they both are probably thinking it. If it’s a mind game Russ no longer knows, but it drives him up the wall enough that the next night he says, “I can’t take this anymore,” and then a lot of things happen, all at once.

Russ still refuses Milt’s help on every possible occasion, which is met by the man’s polite amusement, and Russ still insults Milt’s intelligence, and Milt taunts him with a straight face, and another thing that Russ doesn’t know if it has always been foreplay, or has become one only now.

At some point Milt brings over an expensive coffee maker, exactly like the one in his office. Russ watches him set it up, and they talk about the case at hand, and neither remarks on how odd, or how presumptuous the whole thing is. Honestly, he wouldn’t say no to good coffee. And because it’s the same one he associates the taste of it with Milt anyway.

The sign on the parking lot with his name is suddenly new and fixed, and it’s a small matter that no one really notices, but he does, and he knows who’s done it, and he never says thank you, and Milt doesn’t seem to expect it, and sometimes Russ contemplates the sign and wonders if there will come a time when he will look at it, and think of Milt, and want to punch it like he has never wanted to punch the old one for being broken.

The whole things is like skidding on ice with no control.

One evening they prepare to watch hockey on Milt’s ridiculous big-ass TV. It’s Detroit, and the vicinity of Detroit, and you are geographically obliged to be stupidly up in arms about _Red Wings_. They throw their cells on the table by the couch, like they do every time. Milt’s phone never rings, so when one of them buzzes, Russ assumes it’s himself and reaches blindly, and picks up without looking.

It is not his phone. _“Milton?”_ a woman’s voice asks uncertainly in response to his unfamiliar hello. He blinks and says, “Yeah, he’s right here,” and passes the phone to Milt, whose expression changes from surprise to recognition upon hearing her voice and then to something pinched and impatient, and he mostly hums non-committally, and Russ can’t discern anything from his curt generic phrases.

There’s an awkward pause after he hangs up where Milt presses the edge of the phone to his lips with a grimace and doesn’t meet his eyes, and Russ should give him the benefit of the doubt, this could be anything, only he’s still wondering what woman would be calling him on a Saturday night, except why it’s any of his business anyway, it isn’t.

“My sister,” Milt says, answering his unspoken question, and of course, he should have known. He bites the inside his cheek for being an asshole. “I was expected at a… an event in Detroit tomorrow. She kindly informed me I shouldn’t bother.”

Russ stares at him and wants to ask why, and then wonders when exactly he has _stopped_ asking why, and he can’t recall, but the fact is he has. Milt’s in Battle Creek. The _why_ has become rather irrelevant.

In the end he doesn’t ask anything. They go back to watching the Stanley Cup, and neither mentions the call again.

 

~***~

 

They are staking out a corrupt lawyer at the entrance of the municipal building, waiting for him to leave the DA’s office. Milt has produced a car with tinted windows specifically for that, because naturally the only vehicle with black windows wouldn’t attract anyone’s suspicion, brilliant plan.

Around 6 pm they see Holly leaving the PD offices; she’s holding flowers and smiling into them. Russ sneers a little to himself, feeling something nostalgic, or maybe regretful, and then he feels Milt’s eyes boring into him. He turns his head to check, and sure enough, Milt is layering him with his bleeding concern.

“Stop it,” he says, and blessedly the lawyer is exiting the building at the exact same moment. “There’s our guy. Drive.”

Milt steps on the gas, but doesn’t stop with the careful glances.

“What?” Russ barks, his patience drying up quickly.

“Nothing,” Milt mutters, somewhat abashed.

 _“What?”_ Russ repeats louder and even less pleasantly. He is tired of that answer coming out of Milt’s mouth all the damn time.

“How’s Holly doing?” Milt asks quickly, like ripping off a band-aid.

Russ frowns at him and crosses his arms on his chest. “Still dating that guy from the coffee shop.”

“Oh?” Milt says politely, like he is unsure if he should be pleased or sympathetic.

Russ shrugs. “He’s got plans,” he says.

“For… Holly?” Milt specifies.

“No, for _life_. Ambitions. Which is good,” he concludes tediously.

“Is it?”

“Well, yeah,” Russ shrugs again. “I don’t want her dating some deadbeat whose career height will be serving drinks at a local Starbucks. He’s paying his way through med school, might try his luck out of the city. Which is also good.”

“Because then he’d be out of the picture?” Milt asks, and Russ sneers.

“Because she deserves not to be stuck in this ridiculous town.”

Milt seems taken by surprise by that sentiment. “Did you have plans to get out of this ‘ridiculous town’?” he asks eventually.

 _With the right tools, Russell, you can achieve anything,_ he remembers his mother saying to his eight-year-old self. He sure did have plans.

“Ugh. Yeah. Long time ago,” he admits unenthusiastically, and then glances at Milt sharply. “I also had plans to be an astronaut, and to be able to fly. All things that aren’t happening, and I am fine with that, although, granted, if someone were to throw me out the window, that last one still might come true.”

“I could take you jumping with a parachute,” Milt offers suddenly. “It’s pretty unbelievable.”

Russ can only stare at him, dumbstruck—although he’s sure that to Milt the suggestion made perfect sense.

“Unbelievable is that you thought something about that idea would sound in any way appealing to me. Like that’s remotely recreational,” he shakes his head. “You can take me home, is what you can do, and we can watch someone else jump from a plane with a parachute, and then you can tell me all about how Hollywood got it all wrong.”

Milt smiles. “Sounds reasonable,” he says, and seems to consider something for a moment before throwing him a shrewd look. “Hey, Russ. How did you—Did Holly tell you all that stuff about the coffee shop guy? Or did you check his records and cyberstalk his facebook?”

“Um,” says Russ, and covers his mouth with his fist.

Milt’s smile grows wider.

“I—um—uh—I interviewed his parents,” he mumbles into his knuckles.

Milt tucks his chin, hiding a smile. It looks unexpectedly endearing, and Russ means to act indignant, but there’s no bite in his voice when he asks, _“What?”_ again. He’s grinning.

“Nothing,” Milt looks at the road and not at him, and he’s still smiling. “That is exactly something I thought you would do. What did you tell them?”

“That I’m checking up on claims that his boss is suspected of insurance fraud.”

Milt raises his eyebrows. “Is he?”

“What? No! I don’t know!” Russ grimaces. Like he cares. “I just wanted to get his mom talking, so that she would tell me his entire adorable life story. Or the sad tale of his downfall. Whichever. It turned out to be the former.” He stares at Milt pointedly, “And despite what you might think, Holly dating a guy who is nice and smart _is_ reassuring to me.”

“ _And_ not surprising,” Milt adds thoughtfully.

“What does that mean?” Russ gives him a suspicious glare.

“She’s smart. I’m sure she has excellent taste in men, and if he were someone untoward, she would have not gone out with him again,” he says reasonably.

Russ continues narrowing his eyes at him. “I’m not sure if that’s a dig at me, or—”

Milt chuckles and says, “It’s not. You were just dragging your feet. I’m sure she would have happily gone out with you. _If_ you ever asked.”

Russ considers him for a long silent moment. “I never asked you anything, and you still—do whatever it is you think you do with me,” he points out. It was supposed to be an inquiry somehow, and it sure as hell made a lot more sense in his head.

“Well, I don’t exactly ask you anything either,” Milt says. “Guess you were right about me, I just take what I want.”

“Good thing for you then that it was something I didn’t _not-_ want.”

Milt smiles again, and Russ turns away, squinting. This could have been worded better too. “Eyes on the road,” he mutters again.

 

~***~

 

“Guys. Guys. Everything is terrible.” Funkhauser sprints up to them with an expression that one normally reserves for a doomsday. Everyone tenses up. An expression of fear on a wedding day might have meant a regular problem. This expression means something’s gone to shit.

“What’s up?” Font gets up, plants his hands on Funk’s shoulders. “Calm down. Tell us what’s wrong, we’ll fix it.”

“The priest that we hired got arrested last night for contraband!”

“What?” Font stares. Russ wants to laugh because of course Battle Creek’s holy father would end up being a crook.

“I know! And they didn’t call until right now, what are we gonna do? Where am I gonna find another priest at this time of day?” Funk is on the verge of hyperventilating.

“It’s all right, we’ll call everywhere, we’ll find you a priest,” Jacocks says with an air of confidence that she adopts to put others at ease.

“Aaron,” Milt says suddenly, and everyone stares at him half-suspiciously, half-hopefully, because you can always trust Milt to have a quick-fix grand solution. “I am sure you’d prefer a man of cloth, but if you won’t find anyone, I can officiate your wedding.”

Everyone stares at him. Russ pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re a minister?” he manages to ask.

Milt shrugs. “Yes.”

“Yeah, of course you are.”

Milt just shrugs again, more sheepishly this time. “It’s a long story.” He looks at Funkhauser. “I know it’s probably weird, we aren’t close, we just work together. But I’d be honored to.”

“Yeah, man,” Funk says, and he is sagging in relief. “That’s a load off my back. I can’t see Charlene before the wedding, but could you come down to the bride’s room, explain everything, so that she won’t freak out?”

“Certainly,” Milt smiles readily, standing up and buttoning his jacket, and heads there immediately. Russ tags along.

“You’re a minister,” he repeats. “How are you a minister?”

“Honestly? I just thought it’d be fun,” Milt says. “Romantic. I once watched a man save a wedding exactly like that on a case, and I thought, yeah, I should be able to do that too.”

“You’ve got problems, man,” Russ snorts. “This desire to be the man with all the solutions. It’s unhealthy.”

Milt shrugs. “I don’t know that it’s such a big problem. But, sure, I know it feels good to provide people with help.”

In all honesty, Russ is exactly right, as usual, and Milt knows this about himself. Give something to people, and they will like you, and that’s just the basic rule of how the world operates, simple as that. What he does, even though he doesn’t think on it too often, is a form of social bribery. Without it he’s got nothing that would make people like him just because.

Charlene, naturally, is charmed by him—he’s the knight in shining armor, come to the rescue of her wedding, and he’s so polite and tall and smiling. He officiates the wedding. From where he stands he gets to observe the others from the angle he wasn’t expecting to get—the Commander, Russ, Font, Erin, Holly, Niblet—and they’re all smiling, happy for their friends, and he feels a part of it.

Feels like he belongs.

 

~***~

 

“Do you miss Detroit?” Russ asks, watching Milt dress. He’s putting his clothes on slowly, lazily, like he doesn’t want to leave. If he lived in a storage unit, Russ wouldn’t want to leave either.

Milt laughs. “No,” he says.

Russ scowls. “What’s funny?”

“You have this idea that it was some perfect land where perfect T-1000s like me are produced on a conveyer line. It wasn’t perfect. _Might_ have been a conveyer line,” he allows. “Never felt like home.”

“Do you miss Monaco?” Russ asks after some consideration.

There’s a pause. “No,” Milt says, quieter this time and without laughing, and Russ wonders what kind of a childhood he really had, beneath all the money and opportunities and education. If somebody loved _him_ enough.

He wonders how Milt would even define home if he doesn’t miss any of those places. To ask seems too prying and too personal, and so he asks something stupid instead. “You wanna stay?” Because _he’s_ got a fucking home, at least, and he knows himself, and his worth, and what’s what.

Milt looks back at him. The timing is a bit strange, Russ realizes belatedly, because Milt’s already half-dressed, and it must come off as an afterthought, like he doesn’t mean it—except Milt has this annoying quality of seizing him up just right, and so maybe, probably, he knows that Russ hasn’t thought of asking the question before, not until now. His expression is neutral and unreadable, but his eyes are soft.

He nods, doesn’t say anything, although his throat is constricting around something, and Russ doesn’t say anything either, ‘cause what’s there to say. And that is that.

 

~***~

 

“You know, Skully and Mulder ended up here too,” Milt points out one night, as they’re lying in bed.

Russ just laughs. Laughs because it’s so stupid, so incredibly childish, that comparison that he made, except that yes. Yes they did.

 

~***~

 

In the morning Milt cooks him breakfast.

He slips out of bed at an ungodly hour and goes for a run. Russ sleeps for another hour while he’s gone, and sleeps through him taking a shower, and crawls out only at the sound of something sizzling from the kitchen.

“How do you like your eggs?” Milt greets him.

Russ stares at him, offended at how alert Milt is and hating that he’s apparently an early riser. Back when he dragged Russ out to meet his cheerleader-snitch at the earliest hour, to admit that Russ considers noon to be the perfect hour to wake up would have been a fatal weakness. Seems worth mentioning now though.

“How are you awake,” is the first thing he says, croaks, a little despondently, and the second is, “Scrambled, please. Thank you.”

Milt’s eyes linger on him for a moment and he pushes a cup of coffee towards him. Russ hides his expression into it, suddenly very conscious that neither ‘please’ nor ‘thank you’ are the words he tells Milt often, if ever. This time nobody even had to get shot.

“So. I’ve been thinking,” Milt says. “Should I do something about the safehouse?”

“Yeah. Move out.”

Milt ignores his poignancy. “Is it lacking something obvious?”

“Soul. Like you.” The remark escapes his tongue reflexively before he remembers why it shouldn’t. He looks up at Milt carefully, conscious that this could be kind of a fuck up, but the man just looks annoyed.

“Any _actual_ input?”

Russ shrugs, because what does he want from him, interior design advice? “Look, you gotta decide if it’s a warehouse—”

“Safehouse,” Milt corrects him automatically.

“—or your _home_.”

And only a desperate fucker would call that anybody’s home.

Milt seems to consider it. “When you’re there,” he says, stabbing the omelette with a fork and purposefully not looking at Russ, “I like going there. Then it is home. So I’m just saying, I could outfit it to suit both of us, create an optimal non-working space.”

Russ twists his own knife and fork silently, because he doesn’t know how to handle this consideration or compromise, he simply doesn’t.

 

~***~

 

“Are you—” Jacocks is looking at him carefully. “Were you just— _smiling?_ ”

 _“What?”_ Russ balks and fidgets, hearing the scraping of chairs as others turn their heads to stare at him curiously. It’s been a slow day. His eyes dart in embarrassment between Font and Holly as his expression instantly sours.

“You were!” Jacocks coos triumphantly. “You were totally smiling.”

 _“I wasn’t smiling,”_ he protests. His eyes skid towards Milt’s office guiltily. He is aware that his mouth is twitching and honestly Russ just get it together.

“You literally just smiled while saying you weren’t smiling,” Font says in flat amusement.

Russ shrugs and scoffs, “I can smile!”

“Yeah, right,” Font snorts. “You really can’t.”

“You only ever smile when we close a case, and we aren’t closing anything here,” Holly adds reasonably.

“Ooh, is Pritchett finally stepping down? Do you have new dirt on Milt? Is your mom getting paroled early? No, wait, that wouldn’t be a smiling occasion,” Jacocks is firing theories at him like bullets.

“It’s not— _work_ related!” he grits through clenched teeth, raising his hand to stop her and then shoving his angry index finger into their faces demandingly. “Now, beat it.”

Erin sniffs, offended, but complies and pushes her chair away, sliding back to her desk. Font lingers and whispers to him conspicuously. “If it’s not work related, it must be a lady friend?”

“ _Beat it,_ ” Russ repeats sullenly and stands up. “I’m going for coffee.”

“Uhh…” Jacocks looks at their coffee machine.

“ _Actual_ coffee,” he clarifies and heads for Milt’s office. He doesn’t even want a drink, just pretends to busy his hands with something, and since when Milt’s office is some kind of a hideout for him anyway, but apparently it is. Christine doesn’t greet him, and he returns the courtesy.

Milt looks up from his monitor and watches him, expression slipping from surprised to concerned. Russ waits for the coffee to brew before walking from Milt’s foyer into his actual office space. He stares out the window and says nothing.

“Everything all right?” Milt asks, and Russ knows he can just stay silent and Milt will get it and not ask anything else, and there’s a calming effect in that knowledge alone. He turns his head and looks back at the PD’s desks, and Jacocks seems to be looking gleeful. She must think her hunch is right and he’s here to rile Milt up over some new issue. He wonders how catastrophic it would be if they were to find out, and looks at Milt and asks himself what this even is, if anything.

“Jacocks asked why I was smiling,” he says grudgingly, and challenges Milt to say something back.

Milt blinks, perplexed, and says, “I see,” in his most reasonable tone, and that doesn’t really tell Russ anything.

He grunts and continues leaning against the windowsill and drinks his coffee, and he asks himself why he _was_ smiling, and he doesn’t even know.

 

~***~

 

He’s half-sitting in bed, pouring over the files of the case, hoping for a needle in a haystack he might have missed. It’s already late. Both of them are bone-tired, Milt more so than him, for once.

“Sleep on it,” Milt suggests, mostly muttering into the pillow.

Russ turns his head and looks at him, spread flatly on his stomach beside him, and it’s something new, something he’s still trying to figure out, this relaxed presence of something dangerous and coiled. He has always looked at it as a sort of codependent issue between men and women. You sleep in the same bed, and you spoon her, and protect her, and then it’s a marital thing too, and Milt clearly is none of the above. He’s a partner, an equal, and he can be demanding, and he is fucking strong, and sometimes he looks at Russ like he can eat him alive, and yet here he also is, defenseless, uninhibited, they’re both naked under the sheets, but they’re too tired for anything exerting, and they are still about to just go to sleep together, and what is this thing, what does Milt want from him?

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

Milt laughs into the pillow, but it isn’t condescending. The sound is the low rumble between his ribs, and Russ is tempted to put his palm over Milt’s back and finally feel that laugh with his hand. “With my life,” Milt says. His voice is thick with sleep and still manages to be filled with sincere gravitas.

“How about your soul?” Russ presses.

Milt lifts his head from the pillow and turns to look at him.

“I’m just wondering what it will take to make you tell me. Why you’re in Battle Creek.” Milt’s face falls a little, and Russ raises both palms. “I’m not _asking_ for you to tell me, and I’m not asking for a step-by-step guide, I’m just—wondering what the comfort zone will be?”

Milt continues to stare at him, and Russ can’t tell if it’s a blank refusal, or if he’s honestly considering it. “You know what, forget it,” he says, not bitingly but as a cop-out.

“No, no, I’m—I’m thinking,” Milt says, then turns on his back and stares at the ceiling. “I just—I hate everything about that situation. Not only I’d rather not talk about it, I’d rather it not exist. Thinking about it makes me wanna punch someone. Possibly myself. There was a lot of stupid things done, and a lot of ugly things, and a _lot_ of lying. It’s not about you as much as me not wanting to confront it until it comes knocking.”

“Then why lie about it?”

“It’s easier than facing the complete fuck-up that I was a part of.” For a moment his face is closed-off while he is lost in memories that he doesn’t look like he’s about to disclose. Then he turns to Russ, and he is fully prepared to answer any other question, possibly all of them if Russ really wanted to start prying. His eyes are ridiculously honest.

“Go to sleep,” he says, and a corner of Milt’s mouth twitches in half a smile, and he turns on his stomach again, flopping has arm across Russ’s chest. Russ grunts under his weight for form’s sake, but doesn’t complain. There’s something unspeakably pleasant of having another body pressed up against his own like that, of feeling the solid weight of Milt, half on top of him. He strokes Milt’s smooth back absent-mindedly until they’re both asleep.

 

~***~

 

On Sunday it has been raining since Wednesday.

“You’re soaking wet!” Russ complains, when Milt returns from his morning run, and he scowls even though Milt can’t see it.

Milt’s sweat-shirt is drenched, and he is dripping rain all over the floorboards. They’re at Milt’s place, because no way Russ would have allowed this spillage over his carpet.

“It’s Michigan,” Milt shrugs, getting a change of clothes from the wardrobe, and Russ can hear a smile in his voice. “Rains are a part of the package. Doesn’t mean I stop taking care of myself. Plus, I like running in the rain.”

“Right,” Russ croaks from deep inside the bed. “Because nothing is more empowering than feeling like an ad model for Adidas.”

He hears Milt laugh.

“How many pairs of sneakers you go through a month with this weather anyway?”

“You’d be surprised. They are pretty resilient.”

“Right. Of course. Because you have an excellent cobbler.”

There’s silence and Russ finally unburies himself from under the covers to look at Milt’s face because sometimes he forgets to dial down his crank-meter, and he supposes no one wants to find a complete _asshole_ in their bed first thing Sunday morning.

Milt is silent because he is thirstily drinking water, and he is still dripping rain all over the bedroom, and Russ scowls at him for that, and Milt looks at him with crushing fondness. And Russ has no idea what to do with it, or with him.

 

~***~

 

“Someone’s here for Milt.” Funkhauser enters their office, surprisingly sprightly for a man of his bountiful size.

“What?” For a moment Russ stares at his alarmed expression and cannot understand it. So someone’s here for Milt, so what’s the worry? Then he gets up so fast his chair topples loudly. The ruckus draws Guziewicz out of her office. “W—uh—Who?” he stares at Funk, rubbing his face in a nervous tic. “ _Who’s_ here?”

“The FBI. A lot of them. They don’t look like Milt at all. They’re _scary_ ,” and he widens his eyes significantly.

Russ crosses the room and opens the door into the corridor, staring at the invaders just as they are entering. They come in a pack of six—hard to tell if the rest are outside, or if in Aaron’s over-active imagination this is “a lot”. Although given that even one Milt is a handful, he grants that each new FBI agent would be one too many.

“Why do you think they’re here?” Holly asks. There is a crease of concern between her brows. She’s worried for a friend. Russ rubs his tongue over his teeth, wondering since when he no longer wants to smooth that crease from her face, and since when his own concern seems to overshadow hers.

“Maybe they need his help,” Niblet says good-naturedly.

“Maybe they’re here to arrest him,” Russ grunts. He used to fantasize about this exact scene—the FBI, a cordon of them, swooping in and announcing that Milt is done, has done something terrifically bad or terrifyingly stupid, and he will leave Battle Creek in shame. And Russ will bask in the glorious _“I told you so”_.

Doesn’t bring him as much happiness as he thought it would. In fact, he feels a little like he might puke instead.

Two of the agents take point at the entrance to Milt’s office, determined to make sure that no one will interrupt. The others walk past Christine like she’s not there. Milt rises to his feet and his expression is vulnerably alarmed. He was not expecting them.

Through several glass walls their eyes meet—only briefly, but somehow still significantly—before Milt’s attention is given over to his guests completely.

They talk for a very long time. Long enough that Russ’s legs grow tired, and everyone else returns to their seats, only rarely looking up at him as their lookout. Jacocks is the last to take her seat, after Guziewicz comes out of her office again to tell them all to get back to work.

“Russ? That includes you,” she says, in her _firm_ tone.

“Uh-huh,” he says. “In a minute.” After a pause she lets it go.

Milt doesn’t look scared. Doesn’t look chagrined, or caught red-handed. He looks… surprised. His mouth is open slightly, eyebrows raised, and Russ can hear in his head his, _“Huh.”_ His _i’ve-figured-it-out_ ‘huh’ and maybe his _didn’t-expect-that_ ‘huh’.

After what seems like an eternity, one of the agents shakes Milt’s hand. They say their goodbyes. Milt watches them leave. Neither of the six spare Russ even a glance on their way towards the exit, blowing in and out like the wind. Russ tries catching Milt’s eyes again through the glass, but this time he doesn’t meet his stare. He goes back to his chair and collapses into it, swiveling to face the window and turning his back onto the corridor, and BCPD, and Russ.

Two can play at that game. Russ teeters impatiently, then stubbornly turns around too and goes back to his seat.

“What, are they gone?” Font perks up and rides his chair over to Russ. “What happened?”

“Nothing, they left,” Russ mutters.

“What do you think it was about? Looked damned important.”

“Dunno.”

Font pins him down with a stare, then pushes away from his table and silently slides back. No one bothers him for a while. He thinks about burying his head in some paperwork. His pen doesn’t work. He doesn’t want to move and grab another. He stares off into space and thinks about what it will mean if Milt leaves.

Jaycock’s hand on his shoulder startles him so much he almost yells at her. He’s glad he at least saves some face by not doing it.

“What?” he barks at her.

“We want the gossip,” she says meaningfully.

“Huh?” he says. (It’s not Milt’s huh, it’s an _i’ve-figured-out-nothing_ ‘huh’, a _what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about_ ‘huh’.)

“Go to Milt,” Erin demands, giving him a glare that is meant to serve as an incentive, he guesses. “We wanna know what gives. What that was all about! Don’t you?”

He does. Of course he does, dammit. Pretending to be merely the obliging messenger, grunting unhappily, Russ makes his way across the floor to Milt’s office. Christine looks up at him. “Hey, Russ,” she says. She looks flustered. “Milt left.”

“What? Where?” He stops, taken off guard, and stares behind her back. The chair’s empty.

She shrugs. “Like he tells me anything. Unless he does. Then it’s very precise.”

“Well, screw you too,” he mutters. Her eyebrows arch high. “Not you. Milt. Bailing on us. Screw him. You know who those guys were, what they wanted? What did they talk about?”

“Uh-uh,” she shakes her head. “Kinda wish I did. Doesn’t look like I’m gonna have this job next week.”

 

~***~

 

Milt is waiting for Russ on the stairs of his apartment building. There’s a sports bag at his feet. Russ wonders what’s in it.

“Can I come in?” Milt asks.

Russ wants to say, _I was looking for you,_ and _Why the hell haven’t you called_ , and _Isn’t your suit too expensive to sit on dirty pavements?_ He shrugs indifferently, and watches Milt stand up, but neither of them go in.

“I imagine you want your stuff?” Russ manages to say finally. It comes out more peevishly than he means for it.

“Already took care of that.” The point of Milt’s expensive shoe kicks the bag.

“When—How did you get in?” Russ sputters.

“I made a key,” Milt says, and of course he would, of course he wouldn’t ask permission like a normal person—and yesterday Russ would have laughed at it, at how incapable he is of communicating. But he isn’t in the mood to laugh now. Milt produces the key in question and offers it back to him.

“Yeah, you can—keep it,” Russ sneers, stepping back. “What would I need _your_ spare key for?” Keep it and _use_ it, he means by that, keep using it, but he doesn’t have the courage to say it.

Milt fumbles with it, then slides it delicately into the pocket of his suit.

“When are you leaving?” Russ asks the question that’s really important.

Milt looks a little lost. “Well, I—They didn’t—” he falls silent, and rearranges the sentence in his head a few times, and Russ hates him for it, for his inability to just say things as they are, for being this careful son of a bitch.

“The charges against me have been dropped,” he says, finally.

Russ is too exhausted to be surprised. “There were _charges_ against you?” he asks, and even to his own ears his voice sounds morose.

“Well. Not in any official sense,” Milt says. “I was—The thing about why I was sent to Battle Creek—”

Russ raises his hand. “Yeah, I don’t need to know that.”

“No, but, you—don’t you—you wanted—” Milt seems even more at a loss.

“I don’t care, Milt. I don’t care why you _were_ in Battle Creek, since pretty soon you _aren’t_ gonna be here,” he says with vengeance.

Milt’s expression falls with his shoulders. “You know what,” he says in a thick, tense voice, “on second thought, I don’t need to come in.”

Russ closes his eyes briefly, and his throat goes dry. “Even better,” he says loudly, and heads up the stairs.

Milt watches him wrestle the door open, and presses his mouth into a thin unhappy scowl that seems to belong on Russ’s face rather than his own. He picks up his bag, and then he just leaves.

Russ stops in the doorway and stares at Milt’s back, and _fucking fuck_ this wasn’t even a relationship to begin with, it was just this thing, and well, now it’s over, time to move on, and he’s just this certified _idiot!_ who thought that this—what—that they were connecting? that this meant—that this—it _wasn’t_ a relationship but—oh for Christ’s sake what does it even matter?

In the end, all he is is just a small-town dysfunctional angry asshole. And if he’s being honest with himself, he might have never named the thing between them, but he always knew it would end like this.

 

~***~

 

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Guziewicz says after summoning him to her office like a principal a misbehaved child, “but you and Milt seemed pretty cozy these past couple of months.”

Russ blinks and wonders if it really has been just a few months? Three? Four? God but time flies by fast. He doesn’t correct her. If she said something else, something other than the complete truth, like _seems like you’re friends now,_ he would have denied it, out of sheer stubbornness if nothing else.

He doesn’t know that they’re friends. They’re close, but it seems a very fickle and shaky sort of close, undefined on so many levels that it doesn’t seem particularly close at all upon further examination. It’s more like something you hide in a pocket and are afraid to show to the world for fear that it will crumple.

Guziewicz regards him for a long time, and he just waits, because it doesn’t make much difference to him where to feel miserable. Seconds tick by, or maybe minutes.

“You look like shit,” she says finally, and then, before he can level her with a snide response, “Have you talked to Milt?”

“I have,” he says with a shrug because so what, it doesn’t matter.

“And?” she asks.

“And what? He’s leaving,” Russ tells her impatiently. “He’s packed his shit, I mean, of course he’s leaving, big city awaits—and he isn’t—We aren’t _cozy_ , okay? I am not a person to be _cozy_ with! I bet he is _relieved_ to be leaving.”

“You sure about that?” Her eyebrows speak volumes about how unimpressed she is. “You don’t think he wants to stay?”

“Kim…” he drawls, dry and tired, because sometimes she’s just that, just Kim, and she gives him a look.

“Russ, you’re my best detective,” she says. “So kindly solve the mystery of how much your head is up your ass about Milt Chamberlain and do something about it.”

“This was a punishment, why would he?” he retorts. “And, anyway, not after—me and my—pfft—” he waves his hand vaguely, and rolls his eyes at himself in utter exasperation, shaking his head, and says, “I told him to leave.”

Kim regards him nearly with pity. “So, you really screwed that one up, didn’t you?”

Russ squints at her without saying anything, because he’s too proud to admit that yeah, he sure did, but they both know it anyway.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, then?” she asks sardonically, and he snorts, and cheerlessly laughs.

 

~***~

 

“Hey, asshole!”

Milt looks up upon hearing his voice and smiles at him like a happy idiot. “Russ!”

He goes to meet him half-way, and Russ both hates and recognizes in his soul and already misses that swagger. He glares at Milt because for once it’s his fault. Russ did not sign up for this, for any of this, but Milt had to come and pull his life apart and made him care, and maybe some other words there too.

Milt’s face falls guardedly. “Why are you giving me the aneurism face?” he asks quietly.

“Why the hell are you leaving?” Russ throws at him.

Milt has the gall to appear confused. “Because… I can?” he says.

“Yeah, like we’re such a fucking burden, right? You swooped in with your—cutting edge tech and stuff—made the people _like_ you—and—and bailed us out—You took away from our funding! Yes! That’s what you did, no one was funding us ‘cause you were here, and now you’re gonna leave and we’re back to shitty cars and nothing working and—and—you owe us! You owe it to us to stay!”

Milt continues to look confused, but he’s smiling at Russ now, like he’s got him all figured out.

“You’re a dick,” Russ adds, and squints unhappily, because this whole thing really could have gone way better. Milt seems to think so too, rolling his eyes, but he doesn’t appear to be offended.

“Well, what do you want me to do here?” he asks, his smile kind, and frustrated, and sad all at once.

“I want you to not just fucking stand there like a baby giraffe!” Russ explodes. “I want you to take a fucking stand, I want you—I want you to call me out on my bullshit.”

“Fine,” Milt says challengingly. “No bullshit. Do you want me to stay or go?”

Russ stares at him. Milt stares back. Neither of them seems to be blinking. And it is so simple to open his mouth and say one fucking word. But the hilarious, deeply ironic thing is that Russ still doesn’t trust Milt. Doesn’t trust that he’ll say it back. And he can’t say it first ‘cause he’s apparently a fucking coward.

“You know what, I don’t need this shit,” he mutters, waving his hand. “What am I, some fucking idiot in a Meg Ryan movie, running after you?” He turns around and starts walking away, muttering a ‘Fuck you’ under his breath too, for good measure.

_“Russ, you know, that time that you liked me?” Holly asks him carefully. Russ stares at her with a blank expression, careful that no muscle twitches. It doesn’t smart anymore, not being with her—(someone else smarts ‘cause he’s a fucking smartass)—but now it’s a little guilt-tripping and a little embarrassing._

_“I’m not saying that to make you feel bad, but, just, I thought—well, I thought you’d say something.” Russ grunts vaguely. “And you never did, and so I stopped waiting. I would just hate to see you make that same mistake twice.”_

_“What, with Milt?” he scoffs in disbelief._

_“I never gave you bad advice before, Russ. Just ask him to stay. He will.”_

Russ stops dead in his tracks and takes a deep breath. He thinks about turning around and saying, _Stay. Please._ He wonders if Milt would kiss him then.

He couldn’t say it to Holly first. He can’t say it first to Milt either. Things progressed with Milt only because neither of them required much talking. And because Milt did things his way, when he wanted to. And Russ, well, he can’t ask anybody for anything.

He continues walking away.

 

~***~

 

He spends the weekend cooped up in his apartment without leaving, mostly lying in bed and hating how it suddenly feels empty, occasionally standing up to grab a bottle of beer and a pack of pretzels, and then to take a leak. He pretends he isn’t getting slowly but determinedly drunk. Milt Chamberlain does not deserve Russ getting shitfaced over his leaving. He flicks through the TV channels, but he might as well just be staring at a blank wall.

He doesn’t know why this even stings so much. What he _should_ be upset about, by all accounts, is Holly progressing with her Coffee Shop Guy, and him missing his chance—not go out of his mind over something he has never wished any chances at having.

In his wardrobe hangs a suit that Milt insisted on ordering for him for Funk’s wedding.

_“I don’t need a suit, asshole, what, d’you think I can’t dress now?”_

_“I’m sure you can, this isn’t that. I would just like to get you something nice.”_

_“How about, move out of your stupid warehouse?”_

_“Safehouse,” Milt corrects him predictably, and Russ says the word with him and grins at his annoyed look._

_“It will just be a suit that you will wear once in your life, but it will be tailored to your size, and it’s guanaco wool, with a mix of cashmere wool, and it will feel amazing.”_

(It did.) And it’s true that he probably won’t get to wear it again. Maybe to a funeral—now there’s a cheery thought. Maybe it will be Milt’s. Maybe he will do something stupid and reckless back in Detroit, like jump in front of a gun, because that’s what assholes like him do, what Milt has always done: upturn Russ’s entire paradigm, then leave, then get shot. Happened once already, hasn’t it?

Maybe he ought to just burn it.

Unsurprisingly, he should have really listened to himself, to his own advice, and maybe to the fucking _law,_ that’s always a good idea. The danger of an office romance might not have been the biggest reason why he never went after Holly, but it was at least a part of it, except he never categorized Milt and him like that, his own damn fault, too, they were an animosity is what they were, and it was supposed to maybe end as an angry blowout, and then things would be no different than they were before.

Things are _radically_ different, and why hasn’t he figured it out sooner, that it meant so much, if it has ended up leaving him feeling this way—except of course he didn’t count on having any feelings, or even a singular one, about the matter, and Milt apparently didn’t get them anyway since he just picked up, and left, and punched a hole in Russ’s gut as a parting gift.

And because he’s a sucker for punishment he walks by Milt’s safehouse, and finds exactly what he was expecting, which is nothing. And it’s not like the place had been any kind of lived-in before, but dark and abandoned, now it feels like nothing more than a storage unit. He isn’t sure if in this metaphor he is the idiot who got rented into that space along with other temporary comforts, or if he’s the idiot who didn’t extend the lease.

The enormous TV is still on the wall. When Russ flicks the lights on, he finds a sticker by the door: _BCPD is welcome to use the safe house to its intended purposes. The cleaning crew sterilized everything._

Russ scowls ruefully, wondering if the note is for his benefit. So that every time he saw the couch he wouldn’t be remembering how Milt’s face looked when they were both naked and Russ made him he come undone.

 

~***~

 

Coming to work on Monday he looks at the office space on the right half-expecting Milt to just be there. The blinders are half-drawn, and the lights are out. Christine’s not there, and neither is Milt.

Russ looks away and makes his way into the BCPD office, throwing a nasty enough ‘Hey’ at everyone that no one dares bother him, although Font looked like he wanted to say something. Russ is 70% sure that any and all question posed to him today will be regarding Milt, and he’s just not interested. And if someone will be stupid enough to ask if he’s glad to see Milt go, he’s gonna punch them. (He gives Niblet’s curious face a murdering stare. You just fucking try it.)

Milt laughs.

Russ blinks and his scowl deepens. Great. Now he’s got Milt’s voice is in his head, too. Will he be recall his laugh every time he makes an unfunny crude joke now, as some kind of a weird and pathetic fucking substitute or something?

The man laughs again, closer now. The door to Guziewicz’s office opens, and Milt steps out of there, like it’s just another fucking Monday morning. Russ feels his face elongating.

“Hey, Russ,” Milt says pleasantly, in his most annoying cheerful tone.

Russ doesn’t say it back, and briefly considers kicking him in the teeth. He stares him down darkly. “You forget something?” he asks.

Milt looks at him puzzled, with his fucking annoying, the most deceitful kind of honest surprise planted on his face. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he says.

“I mean, aren’t you supposed to be playing golf with Obama?” he spits out.

For a second Milt’s mouth twitches in a _not-this-again_ sort of way. Then he says, “No, that’s next month.” And Russ can’t tell if he’s telling the truth, or bullshitting him. He gives Milt the _look_. The _“I-don’t-have-the-patience-for-this-today-talk-straight-or-I-swear-to-God-I’m-gonna-shoot-you”_ look.

Milt’s mouth twitches again, this time in a smile. “I have extended my stay in Battle Creek. Come by my office when you have time?” he suggests, and flashes everyone else a smile before exiting.

Russ stares daggers at his back, then looks at Kim. She shrugs. “Don’t look at me. I’m not gonna refuse his resources if he wants to waste them here. You fight your own battles, Russ.”

Russ isn’t afraid of any battles, and that is completely not the reason why he crosses his arms on his chest and turns back to his desk to sulk. He looks at his watch and decides to waste at least five minutes before following. Ten seconds later he’s convinced the watch’s broken because no way time drags this slowly. His skin is prickling with impatience. He tries to calm down, maybe remember lyrics to a song.

“Aren’t you gonna?—” Holly asks.

“In a moment,” he grunts and wills the seconds to go by faster, and then gives up. “Fuck it.” He tosses the watch into the trash and picks himself up.

The blinds in Milt’s office are still half-drawn, and Christine is still not at her table, although Milt did have the courtesy of turning the lights on.

“Where’s your secretary?” Russ asks accusingly.

Milt is standing, leaning against his own table and smiling. “I gave her the day off.”

“Why?” Russ demands. His eyes are boring into Milt with intense hatred, or maybe with intense something else, or both.

“‘Cause I wanted to mess with you,” Milt’s smile twitches, and it is incredible how he can sound so fucking polite while trading insults with him. Like it’s the most natural thing to say.

“Ah. Of course,” Russ snorts. “At least you’re an honest bastard now.” Milt smiles, unoffended. “Why are you here?” Russ presses.

Milt laughs. “Are we really back to that game?”

“No. There’s no game. Here is how it goes. I ask the question, and then you give me an answer. Why are you in Battle Creek?”

Milt’s smile grows fonder. “‘Cause you asked me to stay,” he says, and for the love of God, this insufferable prick, he is going to make Russ regret it, isn’t he?

“I didn’t—That wasn’t—No,” he says, shaking his head. This isn’t gonna fly, this isn’t some kind of a fucking favor, that’s just not good enough. “No. Why are _you_ _here?”_ he repeats, and fucking _please,_ he fucking begs Milt to give him something else.

“Because _I_ wanted to _stay_ ,” Milt says, and his face grows a little uncertain, and a lot more serious, and Russ’s face relaxes, because yeah, yes, this is fine, that places them on even ground, he can work with that.

“Why?” he repeats demandingly, although considerably less hostile.

Milt smiles again, and beckons him with one finger to come closer.

“Why?” Russ insists, squinting at him warily.

“Because the blinds are drawn. And if you come here, no one from the outside will see us even if they were to press their faces to the glass.” Milt’s smile momentarily wavers as he throws the glass walls a concerned look. “Not that I think they’d stoop to it, or—”

Russ’s mouth twitches in a smirk as he comes forward, and maybe he too has a fucking swagger. Milt’s grin spreads, and Russ smashes into it with his mouth, and it feels so stupidly, unbelievably good. He has missed kissing him.

“I hate you,” he growls as soon as he breaks for breath, clutching at Milt’s shirt and crumpling its pristine façade, panting.

Milt laughs breathlessly. “I know you do,” he says indulgently. It sounds somehow wrong.

“I didn’t mean that,” Russ mutters, feeling foolish.

Milt kisses his neck, and kisses his jaw. “I know,” he agrees.

“I’m glad you stayed,” he allows to slip out with a sigh—possibly because Milt’s mouth feels so impossibly fantastic.

“I—”

Russ shoves him away abruptly, “But if you say _‘I know’_ one more time!”

Milt snorts. “I’m _glad_. That you’re glad.”

Russ scowls, but bites his tongue around what he wants to retort to that.

“I hate your tie,” he says irritably instead, unfastening the knot around Milt’s neck, and it riles him up, as always, that Milt’s the taller one, and it riles him up how familiar and how backwards it feels, clothing and unclothing another man.

Milt laughs, and Russ puts his hands on his ribs, and feels the pleasant vibration of it in his palms.

“You can call me a dick, I don’t mind,” Milt tells him.

“ _Suck_ my dick,” Russ counters, and he means it both literally and figuratively, and Milt’s smile grows wider.

“We can do that, too,” he agrees easily. His hands travel to Russ’s belt buckle. Russ exhales sharply, and lets out a rumbling sound out of his chest.

 _“Russ! Milt?”_ Milt’s hands disappear, and Russ takes a few steps back to a less conspicuous place by the time Font’s head, following a mutter of, _“Why is it so dark in here?”_ appears in the doorway. “We got a case,” he says, and looks at Milt without certainty. “Um, you gonna be joining us?”

“Absolutely,” Milt gives him a brilliant smile. “Be there in a second.”

Font looks between them, perplexed, before leaving, and Russ is still fumbling with Milt’s tie in his hands, which must look ridiculous, or suspicious, or both, and maybe Font knows, maybe they all know, and if they don’t, well then maybe they should, Russ thinks, and looks at Milt, and Milt is looking back.

“What are you looking at?” Russ asks, a little bitingly, for the sake of appearances. And Milt smiles at him, and he looks stupidly unreasonably beautiful, and kind, and contented, and it is exhilarating to know how much of it is because of him.

“Can I have my tie back?”

“This tie?” Russ asks, lifting it in one hand. “You want that back, huh?”

Milt inclines his head expectantly, his lips twitching.

“Well come on over here, and get it.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I actually had a whole story for what happened to Milt in my head while I was writing this. Somehow, and maybe for the best, it became absolutely unimportant and not worth getting into.
> 
> And as always, you can find me ~~in the Drift~~ [on my tumblr](http://lessandracassidy.tumblr.com/). :)


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